Farewell to TV's Tony Blair

Here is the Channel 4 schedule for Wednesday night: 8pm Brookside. 8.30pm Travelog. 9pm Fortean TV ("worldwide weirdness"). 9.30pm Brass Eye. 10pm ER. 11pm Friends. 11.30pm Cheers. To the sharp-eyed TV bore this might look slightly curious; no Big Brother and Cheers - are they showing it again? In fact it is the schedule for Channel 4, Wednesday February 12 1997, five months before the young, dynamic BBC executive Michael Jackson took over from Michael Grade as chief executive.

With Jackson announcing last week that he is leaving Channel 4 to pursue new US interests, the media have spent a week trying to assess Jackson's "balanced scorecard". Has our leading television brain and the "man most likely to succeed Greg Dyke" been a success in his first role as chief executive? Has he enhanced his reputation as the finest broadcaster of his generation?

Looking at the schedule Michael Grade left behind, one thing is striking: what Jackson hasn't done is as remarkable as what he has. The lack of ambition and programming risk in the "Jackson years" is sobering and a little disappointing. Grade was like a wildly creative but erratic cook - throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck; TFI Friday, The Girlie Show, The Word, The Big Breakfast, Italian football, racing. It became a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly, but it made Channel 4 by far the most interesting operation in BritishTV. He was derided by the Daily Mail as being Britain's "Pornographer in chief" - a title which profoundly irritated him - but the fact that he had unsettled the most morally conservative publication in Britain must have pleased him enormously.

Jackson, by contrast, was applauded by the Mail, who loved his scheduling of Embarrassing Illnesses, despite the fact that he pushed the grubby envelope way beyond the line Grade drew. A type of voyeuristic programming vying for audience share became known internally at C4 as "porn with purpose". To carry on the cooking analogy, Jackson was much more of a ready meal man; he liked his recipes to be tried and tested, either by US audiences (Ally McBeal, The Sopranos, Sex and the City) or in the UK (Test Cricket, Ibiza Uncovered, The West Wing - which was first shown on Sky One). Even his biggest programming gamble - Big Brother - had already aired in Europe. Audience share and advertising turnover have become the true benchmarks of success and Jackson has maintained the former and improved the latter.

Channel 4 probably contains more watchable programming for an upmarket, youthful audience than the other terrestrial broadcasters put together. But in drama, almost all of this is down to canny buying. In comedy, the channel has fared better with Ali G, the excellent Spaced and Black Books and the passable Smack the Pony, but Friends and Frasier have continued to form its backbone.

Channel 4 under Jackson invites comparisons with the Labour Party under Tony Blair; he took a rough and unpredictable beast and by much polishing, manipulation and discarding of the more radical elements, turned it into a highly marketable product. Jackson, like Blair, is at heart profoundly conservative. He has also merged what was fringe into the mainstream.

But to judge Jackson by his schedule alone would be to miss the point. He is, as one industry guru suggested, more of a venture capitalist than a television executive. To take risks in a market where multichannel and terrestrial competition was as intense as ever would have been tantamount to corporate suicide. When Jackson took over Channel 4, the station's real problem was that it looked landlocked and under threat from a rising tide of competition.

As it owned very little in terms of original programming and only had one outlet, Channel 4 risked becoming swamped. Instead Jackson set about taking the ephemeral qualities of its brand and extending them into areas where fresh revenue streams could be found. As a result Film Four emerged, then E4, accompanied by a host of web-based activities.This is his real legacy; options the broadcaster might not otherwise have had. This too is a perilous business. By spreading the empire Jackson has had to perform the task of a plate-spinner and leaves as all his crockery is perfectly balanced. A shrewd industry analyst observed that the first act of his successor "will therefore be to get out the dustpan and brush".

Jackson has been a success not despite his thoughtful conservatism, but because of it. He reinvigorated Channel 4 as a business, but not as an editorial force for innovative, campaigning television. As a broadcaster, Jackson's legacy is frail. But as a businessman and inspirational manager, he has more than made the Grade.